Who knows what randomness Zipf’s Law will bring into your day?  The path from the train station to the lab takes you through a bit of beautiful forest.  A couple of weeks ago, one of my coworkers saw a biche in the forest on the way to work.  After some discussion, we concluded that the English word for this is a doe.  This got me thinking about just how rare some of the words that you know in your native language are.  I guess that if you belong to a hunting culture in North America, the words for deer might be a lot more common in your life than they are in mine–I don’t hunt, and the incidence of these words in my world must be incredibly low.  Yet: I have a reasonably well-developed vocabulary for talking about deer, like any other English speaker, I imagine.  Let’s see some French equivalents:

Sorry, this page is still under construction.

• le cerf: deer.  (You probably already know that one, but I include it for completeness.)
• la biche: doe.
• la venaison: venison.